Potcake Paradise

The strays here break my heart. They're called pot cakes (apparently named after the peas [aka beans] and rice mixture left at the bottom of the pot that local residents would feed to the dogs). Even though they are a little mangy looking they all look to be in pretty good condition and seem super friendly. I was nervous to go running around the neighborhood at first (not alone of course) because I didn't want any of the dogs to chase us, but even though Blackie (the local black lab looking dog I caught swimming in the ocean) and a pal ran with us for a bit, you could tell they were just playing and soon gave up after a while. The only dog that gave us a problem were owned by locals, who were nice enough to shoo them away for us. Apparently you can take a part of the island home with you by adopting your own pot cake; there's a nonprofit that adopts out puppies from the island and ships them free to the states http://www.potcakeplace.com/.

Some neighborhood potcakes

It took a few days of adjusting but I now really like where we are staying. Though hot, buggy, and in a rougher part of the island (I think in general the southern part of Eleuthera is poorer) it has its charms. The houses are colorful (if somewhat faded) and the people are really nice. Everyone waves and says hello. The neighborhood kids have become our new best friends. I'm still getting accustomed to this neighborhood camaraderie. The other day at a nearby beach, a local Bahamian man came up to me while I was looking for shells and gave me the most beautiful conch shell I have ever seen. I was really taken off guard, thinking "am I going to have to pay him for this?" but no, he just wanted to tell me about it and give it to me as a gift. He then offered to take us out on his boat to go snorkeling or fishing anytime we wanted. And even though I was still a little suspicious and guarded, I'm really starting to get the sense that people here are just nice and do things with no ulterior motives or hidden agendas.

Fresh from the ocean, all he did was brush it off. 

Now before you think that I'm just here goofing around in paradise, I will say that we finally got preliminary approval from the Bahamian Ministry of Health and will begin work today. We are doing surveys of local women in 18 of the settlements up and down the island in order to find out the barriers to women getting mammograms. As I've mentioned, the Bahamas, and Eleuthera in particular, has the highest rates of breast cancer in the world. It's partly a combination of bad diet and all the normal causes, but what's particularly key is that Bahamian women have a higher than normal prevalence of the BRCA-1 and 2 genes, which are also associated with breast cancer. Eleuthera doesn't have it's own mammogram machine so women have to be flown to Nassau to get tested. The Cancer society has a program to help those who can't afford the test on their own; however, because many other islands also need to fly their residents to Nassau, Eleuthera has been only able to send 45 women to get tested. So we are going to see why women aren't signing up for this program (past research indicates a disinclination to even getting tested and a fatalistic attitude towards a diagnosis of breast cancer) and what can be done to promote this mammogram program. Our results could even be used to bolster the argument that the island itself needs its own mammogram machine. Finally some public health in action (in addition to some tanning).